picasa on S Anand

New features in Picasa Beta

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 12:00:00 +0000

New in Picasa’s beta:

geotagging (place photos on the map)
search by colour (find photos with red and yellow)
hide pictures: that’s useful, sometimes…
upload to Google video and to Picasa Web
FTP your photos

Comments

Anand 15 Jun 2006 11:39 am: I got an invitation from Google to try Picasa Web Albums. How does one selectively share some photos and not all in an album ? I do not want to mail these photos instead would like to make only some public. Could you highlight the major differences between this service and that from Flickr ?
S Anand 15 Jun 2006 8:51 pm: You can select photos from your Picasa album to upload – you don’t need to upload all of them. When compared with Flickr, PWA is more for sharing with friends and family than for photo discovery. So no tagging, no groups, no top-10 photos now browsing for other users.
Anand 16 Jun 2006 1:52 pm: I know I can selectively upload photos from Picasa to web albums. I may want to recover space on my PC by uploading all the photos from my hard disk to web albums. from that collection of photos online i may want to share only some publicly. I suppose then I have to create a pair of albums online for every album in Picasa so that one album online can have the private pictures and the other can have the public pictures
S Anand 17 Jun 2006 10:25 am: Yes - you can’t mark individual photos as private. Actually, PicasaWeb doesn’t have any such thing as private. Even if you mark an album as unlisted, if a person knows its URL, they can always access it.
Anand Srini 17 Jun 2006 4:33 pm: If a user has not chosent to make any album public then knowing the URL does not reveal those pictures. try it out. make all your albums unlisted and see for yourself what you can see using your URL.I have tested it. the only solution to my problem is to move private pictures from one album to another album and make it unlisted
S Anand 25 Jun 2006 8:54 am: Oh, OK. But looks like privacy problems will continue to plague Picasa Web Albums for a while. Just do a google search for site:picasaweb.google.com

Software inventory

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 12:00:00 +0000

I end up changing my office laptops every year or so, and hence reinstall lots of software. Here’s my inventory.

I most certainly will install the following.
ActivePerl. I still program. I know Perl. I love Perl.
Acrobat Reader
BitLord
DivX player
Dave’s quicksearch deskbar
Microsoft Office 2003. Has some really good improvements over Office 2000.
NoteTab Light. Multiple tabs notepad. But is there anything better?
Nero Express
Picasa 2
WinAmp (with Media Library import/export)
WinRar
WinZip

I most likely will install the following, but not necessarily.
Adobe Photoshop. Almost vital, but I can live with Microsoft Office Picture Manager.
Goldwave. I often record interviews, or give commentary for home-made movies.
Google Earth (with Fraps). To browse the world and make movies out of them.
Google Toolbar
Mozilla Firefox. For multi-tabbed browsing, mainly. Otherwise, IE is fine.
MSN Messenger. Just for the interface. Somehow, it feels “smoother” than Yahoo.
RealPlayer. Don’t listen to RealAudio that much. Still…
UnixUtils. I use “grep” and “less” more often than “dir”
VirtualDub. For the occasional movie editing that Microsoft Movie Maker can’t handle.
WinHtTrack. To browse offline.
Google Desktop Search. Helps remember my browsing history.

Tempting, but no thanks.
Opera. Mozilla’s fine, thank you.
Yahoo Messenger. MSN Messenger’s better, thank you.
Yahoo Desktop Search. Better interface than Google’s. But no browsing history.

Comments

Krishna 20 Jul 2005 6:08 pm: Looks like bloglines has issues with showing the RSS of the post. Especially the list of programs. I get a blank list :(
Krishna 20 Jul 2005 6:09 pm: And a really nice way to show comments! I love it!
S Anand 20 Jul 2005 7:44 pm: Hope the RSS feed is fixed now. And thanks!
Dhar 21 Jul 2005 1:11 am: Does Winzip do something that Winrar doesnt?
Dhar 21 Jul 2005 1:13 am: No anti-virus software?Tipping my hat to you… You, sir, are a brave man! Try Avast, it is free and it is good!
Shiva 21 Jul 2005 2:05 am: ‘Digit ’ One of the popular PC magazine rated it as the â€˜Bestâ€™, i tried it believe me after that my system had 50 Trojans and worms and my Laptop was badly affected
S Anand 21 Jul 2005 4:52 am: I just like WinZip’s interface. As for anti-virus, believe it or not, yes, I am quite foolish on that front.
S Anand 21 Jul 2005 4:55 am: How’s AVG? Heard it was good.
Krishna 21 Jul 2005 7:11 am: RSS Feed is fine now. Thanks!
Dhar 21 Jul 2005 8:25 am: Since I did not want to shell out loads of moolah, I just downloaded Avast to give it a shot. I have been pretty impressed by it since then. Another one you might want to give a shot is Clamwin (www.clamwin.com)
Dhar 21 Jul 2005 10:37 am: Are you able to run Bitlord from behind firewalls? Or do you use some kind of tunneling software? I have been unable to get bittorrent to work with tunnelling software. :(
S Anand 21 Jul 2005 11:47 am: Not behind a firewall, luckily.
A Karthik 22 Jul 2005 4:33 pm: jedit is good
S Anand 22 Jul 2005 7:17 pm: Hey, great to hear from you, Karthik! Will mail you.
Dhar 25 Jul 2005 10:37 am: Just saw that you will be installing DivX player. Why not give MPlayer or VLC a try. I personally love Mplayer.
sathish 26 Jul 2005 4:05 am: for editors, I have off late starting using ScitE editor.. It is pretty good with multiple tabs and coloring based on the language one uses for coding
Dhar 26 Jul 2005 5:57 am: Somehow I still prefer VIM for simple editing. I tried convincing people at work that I use LaTe X for all document preparation needs, but somehow it got shot down. :(
S Anand 31 Jul 2005 9:05 pm: I tried Avast. Pretty impressive.

Lookout

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 12:00:00 +0000

Microsoft bought Lookout. Lookout searches for e-mail in Outlook across .pst files. As soon as they did, Microsoft closed downloads of Lookout. In contrast, when Google bought Picasa, they opened it up for free.

Picasa

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 12:00:00 +0000

Picasa is good. I incorporated all my photos in it, and I can now search for photos of people by name. (I have catalogued my photos’ file names with peoples’ names.) Now, with Google taking over Picasa, we will soon be able to store/share photos on Google, and search across others’ shared photos, using Google’s image search!